More than 40 years in the past it was once tested that the African continent might be divided into 4 exact language households. study on African languages has therefore been preoccupied with reconstructing and knowing similarities throughout those households. This has intended that an curiosity in different kinds of linguistic courting, akin to even if structural similarities and dissimilarities between African languages are the results of touch among those languages, hasn't ever been the topic of significant learn. This 2007 e-book indicates that such similarities throughout African languages are extra universal than is broadly believed. It presents a large standpoint on Africa as a linguistic quarter, in addition to an research of particular linguistic areas. for you to have a greater knowing of African languages, their buildings, and their background, additional information on those contact-induced relationships is key to knowing Africa's linguistic geography, and to reconstructing its historical past and prehistory.

"Not on the grounds that Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted chook or Agota Kristof’s laptop Trilogy has there been this sort of harrowing novel approximately what it’s wish to be a youngster in a conflict. That Chris Abani is ready to locate humanity, mercy, or even, certain, forgiveness, amid such devastation is anything of a miracle.

Right now a hopelessly romantic love tale, a gripping experience yarn and a superb piece of social anthropology, White Masai is a compulsive learn. when on vacation Corinne Hoffman fell in love with a Masai warrior. After overcoming all kinds of hindrances she moved right into a tiny shack with him and his mom and spent 4 years in Kenya.

African Independence highlights the $64000 position Africa has performed in fresh heritage and the numerous function it is going to proceed to play sooner or later of the US and the globe. In an international the place a lot of the facility and wealth is still centred within the arms of a truly few humans, this booklet seems at how the background of African independence has touched all people—from refugees to heads of country.

Extra info for A Linguistic Geography of Africa (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact)

Sample text

Parsons, 1977b, pp. 2-5. 17. D . W . Cohen, 1977, p. 48; see also Fig. 2, below. 12 Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century leaders and their followers and lineage groups at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century. This migration was part of thefinalstages of the drift of the L u o migrations from the headwaters of the Nile, joined by groups displaced from the northern shores of Lake Victoria and from small states like L u u k a as a result of the pressures of the expanding kingdom of Buganda.

European trading influence spread m u c h more quickly and more widely than missionary influence in thefirsthalf of the nineteenth century. This was largely because the n e w European trade was an outgrowth of the prenineteenth-century slave trade. T h e legitimate trade was pioneered by former slave-traders and often even by practising slave-traders. It is important to emphasize this because the structure of the n e w trade was very similar to that of the old. There was to be an increasing monetization of the trade in the latter part of the century but, in thefirsthalf, the trade in palm oil, groundnuts (peanuts), ivory and cloves depended on the internal slave trade and the trust system: that is, the advance of trade goods on credit to the bigger African traders, thus necessitating measures to protect the investment and to guarantee delivery of goods.

But the djihad leaders also promoted trans-Saharan trade routes and the pilgrimage route to the Eastern Sudan, the Nile Valley and Mecca. 28 T h e Europeans, of course, were quick to note the results of these internal initiatives and were attracted to the possibility of profiting from them. 29 But such speculation, and other hypotheses on the possible effects of abolition have 28. See, for example, P. Curtin, S. Feierman, L . Thompson and J. Vansina, 1978, ch. 14. 29. R . L a w , 1977, especially pp.